Removing a dual boot can be dangerous, and it does not guarantee that Windows will forget about the second boot sector. This is your first step in removing the boot option screen and second OS installation.
Use the following steps to remove a dual boot:
1. Right-click on My Computer, and select Properties.
2. Move to the Advanced tab.
3. Under Startup and Recovery, select Settings.
4. If you wish to leave the OS on the machine but not see the option screen, you can simply set the ‘time to display list of operating systems:’ to 0 as winXP should now be your default OS.
5. Otherwise, if the removal of the OS is your goal, then click edit.
6. First save a copy of the Notepad file which opens ‘boot.ini’ just in case you make a mistake.
You will see lines such as the following:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
There will also be a line for the other OS here under [operating systems] which reads similar to the following: ‘multi(1)disk(0)partition(#)…’
7. Check that your default line points to XP, as it does above. Then erase the line with the other OS, in this case DOS 7.1 (for example, ‘multi(1)’). Please note that the entire line of code to be removed may be more than one line in Notepad. Save the file.
8. Reboo.t
9. If everything looks correct, you can delete the folder associated with the OS that you wish to delete.
If any mistakes occur, load back into your existing OS, copy the old boot.ini over the modified one, and try again.
This is a follow up to the tech-recipe regarding the installation of XP on a laptop without a floppy/cd drive.
